To follow on from my previous post, Philip Goff has now released a preview of an academic paper in progress on this topic. Currently titled "Is the Fine-Tuning Evidence for a
Multiverse?", this paper is a defence of the very same Roger White paper I had been critiquing, and the main argument it tackles relates to some points I made.
I thought I should give my take, but before I do I'll note that I'm not sure if the paper preview link may become stale at some future date or if the paper may be revised in ways that make my comments obsolete. In any case, if you're interested, you should read the paper and my previous post if you haven't already.
I've been thinking a lot lately about the problem of fine-tuning and how it may or may not be resolved by appeal to a multiverse. This has been prompted by recent correspondence with the philosopher Philip Goff and by the book I am currently reading, The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch. I hope to get around to discussing Deutsch's ideas in future, but for now I'm focusing on an argument put forth by Roger White and endorsed by Goff.
The fine-tuning problem is just that the laws of physics describing the universe seem to be fine-tuned so as to allow life to exist. While trying not to be too parochial in our assumptions about what life requires to exist, at least in a universe even vaguely like ours, it seems reasonable to assume that it must at least have time and a stable environment in which to evolve, access to sources of energy and a varied assortment of building blocks from which to assemble itself.
But if the physical constants were slightly different, then perhaps stars, heavier elements or atoms could not have formed. Perhaps the universe would never have expanded from its initial hot, dense state, or would have recollapsed too quickly, or perhaps it would have expanded too quickly for particles to come together at all. When we say the universe appears to be fine-tuned, we are claiming that it appears to be delicately balanced so as to allow complex evolving self-replicators (i.e. life) to exist -- that almost any tweak we imagine to the constants or the laws of physics would result in a simpler, lifeless universe. This curious observation seems to demand an explanation.
In my last post I discussed some issues with identifying objectively which computations a physical system could legitimately be interpreted as instantiating. Computationalism is usually taken to be the view that all it takes to create a conscious mind is to implement the right computation, so the idea that we can't tell objectively when a computation is implemented implies either that there is no objective fact of the matter regarding when minds exist, that all minds exist (everywhere) or that no minds exist. None of these conclusions is particularly appealing!
I find the arguments discussed on the last post to be somewhat persuasive. Indeed, I had had similar concerns before becoming aware of these. What's more, I think the problem may be worse than even Putnam, Searle and Bishop have suggested.
I wanted to come out of blog dormancy to write up my thoughts on what I feel is a very important argument against computationalism. The argument advances the view that there is no objective fact of the matter about which computations a physical system is computing, and if this is the case it would certainly seem to problematise computationalism (the view that what it is to be a conscious mind is just to perform the right kind of computation).
In this post I will explain the argument and some of the common responses to it. I'll reserve my own response (which is quite different from that of most computationalists) for a future post.
As a pretty convinced atheist, I am not the target audience for Longing to Know, by Esther Lightcap Meek, which seeks to explain a view of knowledge in general, but in particular of how we might come to know God. When it was nominated for discussion by my philosophy reading group, I hoped that I would at least get some interesting discussion of epistemology out of it, and to an extent I did, but my experience of the book could be more broadly characterised by frustration and a Longing to Go (away and do something else).
A frustrating interruption of Internet service has rendered me unable to work, so I might as well put my time to good use by catching up on blogging on the assumption that I will be able to upload this text at some later time. It also means, unfortunately, that I am unable to use references as I write. As such, I might get some things wrong.
The issue I want to address is the so-called Ontological Argument for the existence of God as first proposed by St. Anselm almost a thousand yeasrs go and further developed and promoted by Muslim and Christian philosophers, including relatively recent versions by Alvin Plantinga, Kurt Gödel and others.
I was asked to write about this some time ago by a fellow commenter on Massimo Pigliucci's (now no longer active) blog 'Rationally Speaking', and I said I would. However I have been slow to do so for a couple of reasons (in addition to the usual procrastination!). The first is that the argument is so obviously nutty that it seems to be scarcely worth the time to address it. The second is that it is actually quite difficult to point out precisely what is wrong with it!
This is my entry to Sam Harris's Moral Landscape Challenge. Needless to say, it didn't win, but I'm reasonably happy with it nonetheless.
The Moral Landscape (TML) is engagingly written and cleverly argued. Harris starts with the assumption that morality concerns maximising the well-being of conscious creatures (let’s call this Harris’s axiom). Much of what follows is laudable, but there are unavoidable philosophical problems with the notion that science can determine human values. Yes, science can in principle give us answers we can use to improve the human condition. Fully embracing Harris’s axiom, this is the application of science to standard consequentialism and subject to all the same philosophical criticisms.
It is also a relatively trivial idea, and hardly new. If we are to take TML seriously, we must assume it makes a more profound claim: that there are usually objectively correct answers to moral dilemmas and that science can find them.
